No fluke: Rush claims ratings hike

One month after coming under fire for making offensive comments about law student Sandra Fluke, Rush Limbaugh boasted on Thursday that ratings for his popular radio show have gone up as much as 60 percent since his insults stirred a national controversy.

Limbaugh told listeners that he has been “peppered constantly” with the question: “What have your ratings been since that whole Fluke thing happened?”

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Claiming he normally wouldn’t answer the question because of the “ethics of the broadcast business,” Limbaugh made an exception.

“If I wanted to, I could probably make the case that I am the No. 1 show among one-armed amputees at the corner of whatever and whatever in SoHo on Friday afternoons in the third hour,” he said, according to a transcript of his show. “The simple answer is that on the range of all 600 radio stations, our ratings are up anywhere from 10% to 60%, depending on the station.”

After calling Fluke, a second-year Georgetown University law student, a “slut” and “prostitute” last month after she testified on Capitol Hill about women’s access to contraception, Limbaugh and his show came under intense attack, resulting in dozens of companies pulling ads from the program, even after the conservative radio host offered Fluke an apology.

Limbaugh on Thursday gave a shout-out to the businesses that didn’t abandon his show, saying, “The advertisers who hung in here are going gangbusters, yes. I mean, that’s the simple truth. The only ones who got hurt are the ones who left.”

He continued, “And that’s its own tragedy because they left under false, trumped up, unreal pretenses. I don’t want to relive that. I just wanted to answer the question without getting too specific, because everybody’s asking about it.”

Limbaugh also touted a Washington Post article published Wednesday night headlined, “Limbaugh sees heat over comments turn down to a simmer,” which examined how weeks after the Fluke controversy first broke, “advertisers are trickling back to his program and the news media have moved on.”

“I cannot believe it! This program, me, is never accorded this kind of treatment in the mainstream media. The truth about how few advertisers have been lost,” Limbaugh said. “The truth about how few stations left. The truth about how little damage was done to this program. It was stunning.”